Based on the best-selling board game and set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Space Hulk is a 3D digital turn based strategy game that recreates the classic claustrophobic board game experience for single player and multiplayer cross-platform play between PC, Mac and on iOS.

Space Hulk is set in the isolated corridors and tomb-like chambers of an ancient vessel lost in the graveyard of space. Players lead a small army of fearless Space Marine Terminators to battle in a ferocious fight for survival against hordes of predatory alien Genestealers.

The main features are

Blood Angel terminator squad

Fearsome Genestealers with challenging AI

Thematic 3d environment

Single player campaign based on the "Sin of Damnation" hulk

New coop multiplayer levels against the Genestealer AI

Multiplayer head-to-head recreating the board game experience against a friend

RPS: I will try to more insightful this time. The obvious question is what are we in for with this game? We don’t know much about it yet.

Thomas Hentschel Lund: What we’re overall aiming for is to take the board game experience and make a digital game out of it. What we mean with that is not taking it literally, 1:1. If you have in your head the boardgame as you play that, and XCOM, and mix those two together. That’s the game experience you can expect from Space Hulk.

As you play the game and move around, and see your tactical squad, we have an action camera that goes down into the corridor and shows the action up close. Or if you’re in Overwatch and a Genestealer’s going down a corridor, the camera will sometimes switch down and into an over-the-shoulder shot with the Terminator firing an Assault Cannon. You see the Genestealer in real-time moving up and then suddenly it hits and splats.

So, that kind of vision is what we aim for on an overall level. And trying to make it as cinematic and creepy and claustrophobic as possible.

RPS: Have you made any changes to the game mechanics, as well as to the camera stuff?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: Yes, we did do some changes. I mean, it’s still turn-based and that’s the core of it. The game itself will play a lot like the boardgame but we do some optimisations to make the game more fluid, a little bit more action-ish. Some of the things that we’ve been doing are you can click on a tile past a closed door and the door will automatically open, so you get a little bit more fluid gameplay instead of going to the door, standing in front of it, opening it and then you can click onwards. Getting a little bit faster gameplay out of it will still keeping the core, essential boardgame, turn-based feeling.

We had a look at things like the Flamer rules. In the boardgame the Flamer is essentially done like it is due to book-keeping rules. The rule is that if you flame a certain tile, the entire tile that it sits on is lit up with flames. It doesn’t discriminate if it’s a one-tile corridor or an entire room, so we changed that into a template-based system. What you target is actually like the first title, where there’s a cone after it. So you can envisage throwing a bucket of water, and it hits the floor and spread out to both sides for a certain range. We’re still trying to cover the same amount of real-estate with the flames, but we just want to make it a little bit more computer game instead of a boardgame. We could of course have gone for a 1:1 conversion but we simply don’t think that will cater to a computer game crowd as much.

We did some other game rules changes too. We’ve tried to keep it to as few as possible. One of the things that we wanted to do was have asynchronous multiplayer, and to be able to do that in an enjoyable way we will most likely remove the ability to cancel out the enemy Genestealer movement with Command Points during their turn. It would be really odd if they can select to move a Genestealer five tiles, and on the third tile in asynchronous you have to roll back and redo parts of your move because the Terminator player after seeing the five movements says “oh, roll back.” That doesn’t work in an asynchronous mode.

RPS: Are you going to keep in the synchronous mode, or ditch it entirely?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: It’s one of those things we haven’t decided yet. If it works well enough that we can simply do it, or we can also automate some of the things… This is just raw ideas I’m throwing out at the moment, but at the end of the Terminator term, if I have Command Points left and this guy spots somebody, he shoots. Stuff like that, Command allocations that you would otherwise do as Terminator player.

In synchronous mode yes, you could definitely try to interrupt things with a space bar press, for example, and say “yes, I want to use Command Points now.” But we don’t know if it’s going into the final product yet.

RPS: How are you tackling the singleplayer campaign, in terms of in the boardgame it’s quite visible what the opposing Genestealer is up to, how many units he’s going to deploy and where they’re coming from? Doing that means there isn’t too much surprise or shock.

Thomas Hentschel Lund: Yes, we definitely want to take it a little bit further. The story that we want to tell is that you’re [Blood Angel Captain Michaelus] Raphael sitting on the strike cruiser outside the Space Hulk, and you scan into the Hulk. So what we’re going to try to do is have only parts of the level in the line of sight of Terminators visible as 3D models with nice textures. So if you turn to the right, the corridor that you were looking at before will turn into a like a radar scan image. That’s one of the ideas that we want to try to go with, see if that adds an extra dimension to the atmosphere. And also going a little bit more for the radar blip kind of imagery, having something fuzzy going on in that direction.

RPS: Potentially that could affect the strategy quite a lot, you’re going to alter the tactics that you’d use in the boardgame if you basically can’t see any of what’s going on?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: We don’t want to go in and change a really cool, well-balanced, well-played game, and we’re not going to dumb it down so it turns into a shooter. Our vision is that we essentially want to keep the claustrophobic atmosphere, you’re up against millions of Genestealers potentially, you’re the underdog. You’re going to lose this game three out of four times, just as in the boardgame.

For me, that’s one of these essential things that I like about the boardgame. It’s challenging. You’re playing against a huge amount of enemies, and you will most likely lose and have that last stand kind of feeling. “Yes, I actually made it into the objective room with my last guy and he flamed it one turn before the Genestealer got him in the back!”

RPS: Some people have worried that, because it’s coming out on iOS too, that’s going to bring down the PC version. Should we be worried?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: I think the screenshots speak for themselves. They have nothing to worry about. We are making a PC game, and we are doing a downscaled port for iOS. The downscaling primarily comes not from the game mechanics, but in the art department. It’s not possible to run the same lighting, the same specular normal map shaders as you can on a PC game. So we’re going to do the best-looking PC game that we can and, in quotation marks, ‘dumb down’ the iPad version.

RPS: PC’s lead platform, then?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: Yes, it’s definitely the platform that we’re aiming for. This is a PC game with an iPad port, it’s not the iPad version released on PC.

RPS: You’re still shooting for cross-platform play?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: Yes, we are. Game mechanics-wise and content-wise, in terms of missions to play and features, it’s almost the same. There are very few things that we can’t do on iPad but can on PC there, so we’re going to try to keep the iPad version as complete as possible, but PC is number one.

RPS: Have you got the cross-platform stuff actually working yet internally? So often you’ll hear some developer say they’re going to do this then for one reason or another they give up on it before release.

Thomas Hentschel Lund: Yes, this is our fourth turn-based game, and the last one that we did was Frontline Tactics. That actually features cross-platform multiplayer, so you can sit on iPad and play a PC player. There’s some heavily optimised stuff going on in Space Hulk where we’re removing some very small features we added in on Frontline Tactics, where we introduced a sense of latency in the multiplayer, but we’re going to make this as fluid as possible.RPS: How’s co-op going to work?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: We’re going to do it so you play two squads and each player controls a set of them. So I come in with my five guys, and you could come in with your five guys, and while it’s our turn we each do our own turns and play against the AI.

RPS: Ah, interesting. I could take a few guesses but I might leave the readers to speculate. Do you have anything firmer in terms of a release date for Space Hulk?

Thomas Hentschel Lund: Tough question. Later in 2013. [laughs] I’ve been in games and software for so many years that I know promising anything firm is going to be like shooting yourself in the foot. But it’s not going to happen on this side of Summer. And it’s not going to be a Christmas release. Hmm!

Space Hulk – not to be confused with the time Bruce Banner visited the International Space Station – is coming. It’s coming real soon, as in August 15th. We were rather impressed by Full Control’s board game adaption when we saw it a few months ago, not least because it’s shaping up to be one of the most authentic Warhammer 40K tie-ins yet. Stick around for a very short new trailer, which mainly involves things exploding into chunks.

Space Hulk’s loveable bunch of space marines have set up residence on Steam in advance of the game’s release, where the sci-fi turn-based strategy is revealed as having a £22.99 price tag.

Space Hulk was released today on Steam for $30. I know little to nothing about the Warhammer universe. I've never played the board game or collected the overpriced figurines. So I would hope Space Hulk stands up on its own merits as a video game.

In the options, you can thankfully turn off the action cam/shakycam. There's an "input options" section but none of the keys can be remapped. Would be nice to be able to check the manual mid-mission.

There are both autosaves and manual saves, but sometimes the manual save option is locked. The manual doesn't mention limits on saves at all. I'm not knocking limited saves to up the difficulty, but it would be nice to know when you can and can't save.

Hard difficulty is described as normal with 4 max CP and a realtime time limit on player phase. I remember rolling 5-6 CP on hard, though, so maybe it's not working as intended. I don't mind realtime time limits in tactics games for the most part, as long as I'm not being slowed down too much by the combat speed and UI. There's an undo button that lets you spam the RNG if you get a bad roll, although it's not quite as effective on hard mode.

I cleared the 3 prologue missions and 5 main story missions on hard without fail up until mission 6, which seems bugged. The victory conditions state to wake 3 and escape with 2 + librarian, which I did and then some. I woke all terminators, escaped with 6 (1 dead), with the librarian last, and still failed. If I'm wrong feel free to correct me, but that's what the mission conditions say.

Combat speed is about as slow as you'd expect. Your marines move and turn with all the agility of a dump truck, with no way to speed things up. It gets tiring very quickly watching them shuffle around at a snails pace. And yes, the realtime timer on hard mode keeps ticking even as the marines take their sweet time shuffling into position.

Frankly, I don't accept "it's a board game" or "they're meant to be slow" as an excuse. You should be able to fast forward or skip movement/combat animations if desired. The UI is acceptable and responsive, although some of the keyboard shortcuts are on the right hand side of the keyboard, and I had to wrestle with the camera at times to move multiple units at once. It's just the combat animations that are a drag.

Not surprisingly, combat has a very "board game" feel. Combat consists of moving slowly through corridors while saving enough AP/CP to overwatch or guard against incoming hordes of grunts. Every map I played was a series of one square wide corridors with a few 3x3 rooms. There are only two enemy types in the game, a melee grunt and a larger boss sized melee grunt.

There are a few mission objectives to add some variety to the corridor shooting, but it's very repetitive overall. Most of the variety comes in the different weapons you can play with to mow down endless waves of grunts. You get 15 missions total - not a whole lot to chew on unless you plan on replaying for achievements.

Most of the enjoyment of the game will probably come during enemy phase as you watch your well placed marines mow or beat down an endless stream of hapless grunts. If you're a serious Warhammer fan and loved the board game, you'll probably get a kick out of it.

There's a multiplayer mode but it doesn't seem like it translates very well from the board game, which is a local multiplayer match involving dice, board pieces, pizza, and probably beer. You just can't translate some of the board game experience into an online video game, same with online D&D.

They really should add an option to speed up or skip animations and patch the bugs asap, though.

Update: A 1.01 patch was released that fixes the mission 6 bug and speeds up the marines a little bit.